Convert CSV to KML/KMZ using Google Maps In my last post, I was bulk gathering GPS coordinates from the internet. After I had them, I still needed a method to display them. Luckily, Google My Maps offers a versatile import
nodejs Scraping Wikipedia with NightmareJS I've written a lot of webscrapers in the past. Each approach I've used has its benefits and drawbacks. If I need to be able to do anything more complicated than extract some text
nginx Nginx redirects using Lua For years, I've been a big fan of DuckDuckGo's bang feature. I use it any time I have a specific site I want to search. For example, if I know the result I
javascript Set content of a frame with HTML string I ran into a problem when I was trying to display an HTML page hosted on Github. Since Github serves HTML files as raw text in the content type headers, you can't just
C++ UUID Generation in C++11 The C++ standard libary has come a long way in the last ten years. It contains a lot of useful functions that make stuff easy that used to be a chore in C+
Formatting JSON without external libraries Most programming languages today have great JSON support. If it isn't built into the language, there is a de facto standard library you can add to your project. Included in these libraries is
Convert a class of static fields to a dictionary in C# I was coding in a C# project when I came across a class that was mapping names to GUIDs. Since GUIDs are objects, you can't simply put them in a const array or
python Use Python's xmltodict to convert XML to JSON I found myself recently having to deal with a large and complex XML document. I wanted to use Python's excellent paradigms like generators and list comprehension to carve up the XML into more
Use System.Xml.XmlDocument to create HTML in C# If you need to create HTML, it is usually a bad idea to just concatenate strings together. It tends to create brittle and invalid documents once there is any level of complexity to
Use Ghost's API to retrieve posts This blog is running Ghost, a relatively new blogging platform developed with NodeJS. It seemed like a perfect match for this website when I was first starting off because I only needed something
Scraping a book from Kindle (read.amazon.com) After writing my latest post on scraping text from Amazon's web Kindle reader, I got an idea. I wondered how hard it would be to scrape an entire book with the method. Here's
Copy text from Kindle e-books (read.amazon.com) I recently bought an e-book on Amazon. It had been a while since I had last done it, so I was surprised to see they had an online viewer for the book at
Implementing Java's String.hashCode in JavaScript I recently needed a simple way to keep track of if I had seen a particular string before. A naive way to approach this would have been simply to keep an array of
Upload files as multipart with HTML 5 and Angular 1.6 I recently came across a well designed add-on to upload files with Angular called angular-file-upload. It's highly customizable, takes full advantage of the HTML 5 file drag and drop, progress, and size API,
Create PDFs with HTML using wkhtmltopdf and Node Creating PDFs is a deceptively simple problem. It seems like a well defined problem. It's a ubiquitous format and they are static. We use PDFs every day and know how they should look
Resizing SVGs in HTML with correct scaling When I was trying to resize some SVG images to better fit onto a PDF, I thought it would be as simple as resizing a <img> tag: simply to change the
Exploring Knuth's multiplicative hash While researching some cryptography methods, I stumbled upon Knuth's multiplicative hash method. I was surprised how well it worked for how simple it is. It's not perfect but it is good enough for
Getting all paths of an JavaScript object I recently came across a problem where I needed to iterate through a JavaScript object and apply an operation to another object with the same structure. The best way I've found to iterate
Creating responsive tables with flexbox One of the most promising developments in CSS recently has been the flexbox display option. Ever since bootstrap hit the scene, grid layout platforms have all but superseded the old ways of designing
Test if a string is alphanumeric in JavaScript It's fairly easy to test if a string contains any alphanumeric characters with regular expressions. However, they aren't functions. They can't be passed as arguments to map, filter, reduce, and can't be composed.
Create an object by path in JavaScript If you've ever dug into more complex usage of mkdir on any Unix flavor, you've probably used the -p option before. It allows you to create a deep path with only one command.
Using WebWorkers One thing commonly seen as a limitation of JavaScript is the lack of a decent parallelization paradigm. Given the humble beginnings of the language, it is no surprise that one of the more
Communicating between iframes with window.postMessage Since the late-90s, extensively using iframes has been maligned by webdesingers. Used in the improper way, they make it very hard to save application state, are often ignored by search engines, and open
Dynamic Table in Vue 2.0 I've been hearing a lot of good things lately about the Vue framework. A work with Angular on a daily basis, so the prospect of a more performant, stripped down version of Angular
Get an array of previous days in using JavaScript's Date API I was recently implementing a calendar component on a UI and it required an array of dates to initialize it. I wanted to show the last 90 days. MomentJS has some neat utility
